Turn Off SpeedGrader Auto Open

Is there a way to turn off SpeedGrader from auto-opening Excel files? My entire class submits Excel files and I zip them up and download them offline to review/grade. I then go back into SpeedGrader to provide feedback, but once I do the system is slow in trying to auto display the Excel files (I'm talking several minutes slow). Chrome thinks the page has become unresponsive and wants to stop the page from processing.

Having the ability to turn off the auto-open functionality across all submissions for a particular assignment would be great.

This may very well be something to consider as a Feature Idea, Jonathan Schlereth ...and I can tell you that I would probably vote for it. Now that the new DocViewer is displaying a lot more document types than Crocodoc used to, this is a valid concern! I believe that Speedgrader may be the subject of some future development work, but I'm not sure. (A lot of the Community is at InstructureCon 2017 and this may be something that gets spoken about there.) Perhaps wait and see if there is any discussion about this afterwards, since I can't imagine you will be the only person to see this occur.

In the meantime, I might suggest--as a former instructor who used Excel files himself--to consider embedded comments within the spreadsheet. (Though you may already be doing this.) I took advantage of the awesome ability in Canvas of downloading all student submissions as a zip file and then reuploading them as zip file. You may be aware of this ability, but if not, details are here: How do I upload all student submissions for an assignment in the Gradebook?

So, not an answer...but perhaps stay tuned to the Canvas Community and if you don't hear anything, the Feature Idea may be in order.

This may very well be something to consider as a Feature Idea, Jonathan Schlereth ...and I can tell you that I would probably vote for it. Now that the new DocViewer is displaying a lot more document types than Crocodoc used to, this is a valid concern! I believe that Speedgrader may be the subject of some future development work, but I'm not sure. (A lot of the Community is at InstructureCon 2017 and this may be something that gets spoken about there.) Perhaps wait and see if there is any discussion about this afterwards, since I can't imagine you will be the only person to see this occur.

In the meantime, I might suggest--as a former instructor who used Excel files himself--to consider embedded comments within the spreadsheet. (Though you may already be doing this.) I took advantage of the awesome ability in Canvas of downloading all student submissions as a zip file and then reuploading them as zip file. You may be aware of this ability, but if not, details are here: How do I upload all student submissions for an assignment in the Gradebook?

So, not an answer...but perhaps stay tuned to the Canvas Community and if you don't hear anything, the Feature Idea may be in order.

Thanks for the tips and the information on commenting directly within Excel, that's not a bad idea. In the short term I also discovered the ability to make comments directly from the gradebook, that has been the more efficient process than trying to go through SpeedGrader.

Were you able to find an answer to your question? I am going to go ahead and mark this question as answered because there hasn't been any more activity in a while so I assume that you have the information that you need. If you still have a question about this or if you have information that you would like to share with the community, by all means, please do come back and leave a comment. Also, if this question has been answered by one of the previous replies, please feel free to mark that answer as correct.